Job Outlook

Employment Demand

The growth in the area of big data and the need for deriving insight from this data has a direct correlation on employment demand for academically trained business analysts/data scientists. Our program will teach students the technical skills they need in order to work with big data in business settings.

Our program is classified under CIP code: 52.1301, “Management Science”. Graduates with their master degrees in Management Science are considered data scientists or business analysts depending on the scope and extent of their technical skills and business acumen. Dice.com reports that business analysts are becoming “more like data-centric business intelligence analysts, similar to data scientists.”

The April 2015 edition of Analytics (INFORMS) says that the data science profession has emerged to solve the peculiar computing and analysis problems of data that are not only big but also unstructured and messy. Employees need to know how to use tools invented specifically to store and retrieve massive amounts of data efficiently. "They need to be proficient at distinguishing the useful from the useless in messy data through the use of sophisticated statistical models and machine learning techniques."

National Employment Demand

Sara Royster, economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), writes in Working with Big Data that employers are looking for people with master’s degrees to fulfill their needs. "In addition to technical knowledge, data scientists also need to be creative thinkers and problem solvers. To develop these valuable skills, a graduate program should teach communication skills, teamwork, and curiosity." Our curriculum integrates such skill development throughout the program at an advanced level.

The job possibilities are as Big as Big Data

Graduates of our program will gain the technical skills required of data scientists and the business context skills required of business analysts. They will be trained to work in a variety of industries such as accounting, consulting, defense, energy, financial services, manufacturing, retail, technology, telecommunications and transportation. The following job titles would be appropriate for graduates with this degree: Business Analyst, Business Intelligence Analyst, Statistician, Operations Research Analyst, Big Data Engineer, Optimization Analyst, Data Analyst, and Business Analytics Consultant.